Moyra Davey Takes a Chance

On a recent sunny Saturday, the photographer and writer Moyra Davey took her Nikon camera (35 mm, no zoom) to the Trinity Church Cemetery’s northern extension, two blocks from her apartment. Davey, a Washington Heights resident for twelve years, was photographing her neighborhood, from Riverside Park to the Hispanic Society, as part of a commissioned work that would send “a slice of cityscape” to São Paulo for the city’s biennial. Her missive to Brazil, when she sends it, will be literal: since 2007, Davey has “liberated” herself from concerns about “fingerprints and dings” on prints by sending them as mailed correspondence. (Last year, she sent photos-as-letters of Paris street life to MOMA to exhibit in the museum’s New Photography show.) Before dispatching them, she will gingerly fold each poster-sized print into a letter-size envelope, and seal it, with four squares of colored tape placed symmetrically around its edges.

At the cemetery, Davey considered her options. Ralph Ellison, John James Audubon, some of the Astors, and Jerry Orbach were all buried at Trinity; former mayor Ed Koch, still alive and kicking, already had his headstone erected, engraved, and spotlit. She’d tried previously to find Ellison’s tomb according to the cemetery map, but hadn’t been successful. She decided to inquire at the office.

Enter Manny Rivera, weekend security guard, age twenty-three, chinstrap beard. “I’ve looked for him myself but to no avail,” he said. He asked Davey to sign the visitor’s registry, and then offered to walk with her, “since I’ve got to do my rounds anyway.”

Davey’s artistic strategy is largely indebted to chance—she recommends you “fill yourself up with good things for later”—and so she shoots at random, flâneuse-like. Abandoning her search for Ellison’s grave, Davey gamely followed Rivera, who denied that he was a tour guide: “I don’t like to not have the answers. And there’s a lot that I don’t know. I’ll stick to the security. I can tackle somebody if I need to.” He’s seen visitors leave curious mementos—“horse heads, goat heads, all kinds of random stuff”—which he ascribes to Santería. “A group of Haitians, on the Astors’ plot, they leave an envelope with money in it. Twenty-one dollars in singles and twenty-one cents in pennies.”

Davey and her camera are no stranger to cemeteries; for her 2009 video, “My Necropolis,” she filmed in Montparnasse and Père Lachaise, in Paris, as well as in Trinity. In Paris, she focussed on the books atop the tombs, depicting the graveyard as a sculptural library. In essays on the accidental nature of photography, she’s written that she wants to make photographs that “take seed in words,” and indeed, it was the books she was reading in Paris—Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking My Library” and Peter Hujar’s “Portraits in Life and Death”—that coaxed her away from the interiors she habitually documented and into the street. While many contemporary photographers produce grand tableaus and ever-larger prints, Davey’s photos are humble and precise.

At Trinity, Davey stopped to examine a diminutive stone animal—a mouse, perhaps, or a small bear—that crowned a gravestone. The stone figure was chipped on top and worn away by the rain. “Lambs are really common for babies’ graves,” she explained, but she couldn’t identify the animal. Rivera confirmed: the deceased was four years old. Then Davey took her first shot of the day: the gravestone of Charles Dickens’s son, Alfred Tennyson Dickens, which was engraved with a cross pattée. Rivera stood with his back turned. “When you took that picture, I was not standing there. Technically you’re not supposed to take pictures of the names,” he said. “Privacy issues. I don’t know what privacy a person needs when he’s dead, but anyway.” Before they parted, Rivera led Davey to Koch’s preëmptive grave, inscribed with an epitaph in praise of the former mayor’s “fierce” love of New Yorkers and Daniel Pearl’s affirmation of his own Judaism. The grave remained undocumented for the Brazilians.

Later, in Riverside Park, Davey saw a plastic bag tied around two square stones and hung from a tree branch. “An offering,” Davey remarked, recalling Rivera’s account of mourners’ oblations. Then she crossed the Trans-Manhattan Expressway and headed home.

Back at her apartment, developed prints from previous walks were arrayed on a table. There were images of the columns of the 157th Street subway station; the train tracks that jag through Riverside Park; green-and-white parakeets perched on the West Side Highway girders. Davey riffled through a bag and pulled out a postcard. Produced by the Studio Museum, in Harlem, it showed a reproduction of “Critter,” a photograph Davey took at Trinity. At the card’s center, in a shallow depth of field, sat the same small black animal that was perched atop the child’s gravestone. Eight squares of green tape, two postage stamps, and Davey’s handwriting—remnants of the photograph’s life as a letter—crowded the top left quadrant. “Nobody’s ever said anything—I take photographs there all the time.”

Photographs by Moyra Davey. (Click to enlarge.)

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